A Better Way to Rein In Lobbying

By Lee Drutman

April 24, 2015

WASHINGTON — CORPORATE influence is an old problem in American democracy. But in the last decade or so, corporate spending to influence Congress and federal agencies has reached a new, and probably unsustainable, level.

Corporations and their trade associations now spend about $2.6 billion a year in reported lobbying, and probably as much on unreported lobbying. That is more than the funding for the entire Senate ($860 million) and House ($1.18 billion) combined, and the gap grows wider every year.

Moreover, that $2.6 billion is about 34 times the total lobbying spending for all labor unions and groups representing public and consumer interests — the organizations most likely to serve as a countervailing force to business outside of government.

This doesn’t mean that corporations always get what they want. Politics is not a vending machine. And in the current gridlock, it’s hard to do anything. But it does mean that, with rare exceptions, any significant policy changes, especially on economic or regulatory issues, will require the support of large corporations.

And yet there is little use in calling for limits on corporate lobbying. For one thing, any cap on lobbying would run up against basic American ideals of participatory democracy. More to the point, the commitment of corporate interests to Washington is such that they would quickly find ways around any attempt to curtail their activity.

A better strategy would be to rebalance American democracy.

We can start with Congress. Sarcastic observers often complain that we have the best Congress money can buy. Actually, it’s the opposite. We’ve been doing Congress on the cheap for decades. Thanks to stagnating budgets and a few bouts of budget slashing, it has about a third fewer committee staff members than it had in 1980, which means it has less and less experience and expertise to deal with our most pressing problems — and, instead, effectively outsources more and more of its work to lobbyists.

Because congressional pay is considerably less than that of comparable private sector jobs, staff members usually stay just long enough to get experience and build connections, and then leave — often to become lobbyists.

“It’s tough to live off the government paycheck,” one lobbyist told me. “One of the big things that’s wrong with the system is that somebody finally learns their job and then they have to move on, so you have a bunch of young folks who turn to lobbyists to figure out their jobs.”

It doesn’t need to be this way. We can give the House and Senate (which account for a minuscule 0.06 percent of the federal budget) the resources to hire and keep enough of the best people, especially in key committee positions. We can bolster independent capacity for technical analysis by giving a boost to the research arms of Congress, like the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office.

While congressional salaries can’t possibly equal lobbying salaries, they don’t have to. The thrill of being on the inside is enough of a draw that congressional offices have little trouble filling openings. The problem is that staffers burn out quickly. More money, shorter hours and better working conditions wouldn’t keep everyone, but they’d keep enough good people.

Even many fiscal conservatives, like Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, are asking for more resources. “The committee needs to add staff, particularly in tax, health care and the economics fields” to meet its responsibilities, he said at a House Administration Committee hearing in February, at which he requested a 4 percent budget increase.

None of this is to say that lobbyists don’t bring valuable perspectives to governing — they do. That’s why balancing them, instead of limiting them, makes sense. No side has a monopoly on the truth. But we’re most likely to get the best policies if decision makers can hear the strongest case on all sides.

Small farmers will never outspend agribusiness, and yet on a policy level, we want their differing perspectives to have equal weight. That’s why rebalancing also means supporting policy perspectives that don’t support themselves quite so easily.

This is obviously tricky — the government shouldn’t play favorites. Still, it’s worth exploring ways we can combine low-cost mechanisms, like petitions and polling, to discover which views are widely held in the electorate but lack adequate representation in Washington. We can then support lobbyists to work on behalf of those perspectives so that all points of view have a fair shot.

It’s easy to get depressed about the state of American democracy. But we don’t need to be. The solutions are not overly complicated: Give government the resources it needs to think for itself and to develop policy without having to depend almost entirely on outside lobbyists. Make sure all sides have the resources to make their best case. The politics of checks and balances can do the rest.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, is the author of “The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate.”